learning without awareness

a phenomenon said to occur when an individual’s behavior has been affected without that individual being aware of the conditions affecting the behavior, of the relationship between those conditions and the behavior, or of the fact that the behavior has changed. The existence of such learning is controversial but evidence has been found in classical conditioning, procedural learning, implicit learning, and subliminal learning. However, the critical data for assessing awareness depend on experimental participants’ verbal reports that they are unable to describe the learning experience to which they were exposed.

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Psychology term of the day

February 25th 2025

single-case design

an approach to the empirical study of a process that tracks a single unit (e.g., person, family, class, school, company) in depth over time. Specific types include the alternating treatments design, the multiple baseline design, the reversal design, and the withdrawal design. In other words, it is a within-subjects design with just one unit of analysis. For example, a researcher may use a single-case design for a small group of patients with a tic. After observing the patients and establishing the number of tics per hour, the researcher would then conduct an intervention and watch what happens over time, thus revealing the richness of any change. Such studies are useful for generating ideas for broader studies and for focusing on the microlevel concerns associated with a particular unit. However, data from these studies need to be evaluated carefully given the many potential threats to internal validity; there are also issues relating to the sampling of both the one unit and the process it undergoes. Also called N-of-1 design; N=1 design; single-participant design; single-subject (case) design.